Look too closely at an Impressionist painting and all you see are dabs of paint. But you’ll miss the beauty of the Big Picture.

IT service delivery is similar. You can’t just look at a server here or a router there to understand how well you’re delivering services. You have to see the entire Big Picture.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done—especially as IT moves to hybrid cloud. Point solutions can show you the “dabs.” But they can’t help you quickly understand all the issues across your end-to-end infrastructure that can impact your critical services.

That’s why unified monitoring of hybrid cloud is essential for digital business success.

Silos, Complexity, and Change

Infrastructure visibility has always been a struggle for IT. Reasons for this include:

• IT infrastructure includes many different types of components. Each of these component types tends to attract its own subject-matter experts who adopt their own specialized tools.
• Applications depend on a growing number of data sources and growing combinations of application logic running on different platforms in different locations. As this complexity increases, so does the difficulty of detecting weak links in the delivery chain.
• IT is always moving VMs, upgrading storage, and reconfiguring the network. This constant motion makes it difficult to understand the end-to-end delivery path of any given service at any given moment.

IT organizations that overcome these issues have a major advantage, because they can quickly and efficiently detect and remediate infrastructure bottlenecks—often before those bottlenecks impact service levels. This advantage is especially valuable as customers increasingly interact with companies digitally, since outages and bad experiences adversely impact both immediate transaction revenue and long-term brand likability.

Hybrid Cloud: Better and Worse

In some respects, hybrid cloud makes life easier for IT when it comes to infrastructure. It allows IT to quickly add capacity as needed, without large capital outlays. It gives IT earlier access to innovative technologies. And it lets IT delegate infrastructure maintenance to service providers.

But hybrid cloud also makes infrastructure monitoring more challenging in several ways, including:

• Monitoring a server in the cloud isn’t like monitoring a server in your datacenter. Cloud providers vary significantly in what they let you see and how they let you see it. So the more you use cloud—and the more different cloud providers you work with—the more of a challenge monitoring becomes.
• Cloud exacerbates change-related monitoring issues by automating and accelerating the fluidity with which infrastructure get re-configured in response to shifts in demand.
• As IT utilizes the cloud more aggressively, it also more aggressively adopts new technologies such as containerization and SDN. These technologies require IT to keep adding new monitoring capabilities to its existing toolkit.

IT organizations that don’t meet these new challenges won’t be able to efficiently protect the user experience. Their ability to embrace innovative new cloud technologies will also be significantly hampered by their inability to properly monitor those new technologies.

CA’s Response

CA has responded to this intensifying need for across-the-board hybrid cloud monitoring with significant enhancements to CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM). These enhancements include performance monitoring of Docker containers, PureStorage arrays, Nutanix hyperconverged systems, and OpenStack cloud environments—as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and billing metrics.

CA UIM provides IT with the unified visibility it needs to efficiently and proactively monitor whatever combination of physical, virtualized, and cloud infrastructure it has in place at any given time. Benefits of this complete hybrid cloud monitoring solution include faster time-to-fix, increased staff productivity, streamlined adoption of new cloud technologies, and—most important of all—better protection of the customer’s quality-of-experience.

That quality-of-experience, after all, is what determines IT’s value to the business. So IT has to be able to see the Big Picture. Otherwise, it won’t know whether it has put together a masterpiece—or just a mass of pieces.

To learn more, join CA Technologies, IDG and industry experts on Thursday, June 23 from 12 p.m. ET to 2 p.m. ET for the live virtual event, Does Your Cloud Strategy Deliver in the Application Economy?. To register for the event, visit http://transform.ca.com/IDG-Hybrid-Cloud.html.

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